I work at a small machine learning boutique that serves very large organizations in diverse sectors and industries. This requires deep dives into the domain because we want to make the most out of their domain experts and precisely define problems. This requires reading.

Tools:

- Use TaskWarrior to add tasks for a project with certain tags (+read +watch +book, etc). When you are consuming a resource and it mentions another resource, create a task and get back right away to your consumption.

- Take notes (Markdown works)

Books:

- Does the field have a bible? Read it.

- What are the best books on the topic? Read them.

- Is there a "body of knowledge"[0], get it.

- Is there a governing body, an institute that publishes the "state of the art", or best practices?

- ISO/IEC standard for the problem you're solving for that particular sector or industry? Get it (for example, we work with banks, telcos, energy companies, railway transportation. There are standards that are specific to a topic for that sector or industry).

- Publications relevant to that field: only from people who have expertise on the subject matter. You don't want people blogging about a deed they never did. This is less present in petroleum engineering or automatic railway systems engineering than it is for, say, machine learning, where every kid tweets and Mediums about production ML. In other words, this cleaning task is easier in some fields than others.

- Install "Just Read" extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpm...

It enables you to read articles without the noise [zen mode/distraction free]. It also reshapes text to around 70 characters, and makes it larger. If you read a lot, then it is important to remove the barriers.

Papers:

- Does the field have a journal/"proceedings"/a living body of work?

- Are there seminal papers? Read them.

- Read papers about the problem you are trying to solve in other fields.

Video:

- Install "Video Speed Controller" extension[1]. Why? Some talks captured on video don't contain the link to slides but show the slides in the video. Use "Video Speed Controller" at 16x to use the video as "slides", verify that the talk has enough information density, and decide whether to invest its actual duration to watch it or not.

i.e: if a talk is 1 hour, speeding 16x enables you to check its content in 3 or 4 minutes. If it's acceptable, you can invest one hour. If it's not, you only "wasted" 3 or 4 minutes instead of one hour. This is important when there are a lot of talks in your backlog. You can go through 30 talks of one hour each, eliminate those that are not relevant to you.

- Install "YouTube Captions Search". Why? You can use that extension to search in a YouTube video captions. You want to get to the moment where the presenter talks about a specific topic, use that extension and it'll give you the timestamps where a word was said. Go directly there.

This also helps eliminate videos that don't discuss the topic you are interested in when the video does not contain slides.

- Use YouGlish[3]. It is a site to learn pronunciation, but I use it to find videos that mention a topic I am interested in. It searches videos that contain in their captions a word you type in the search bar.

Bonus: you can try to use that with several languages (youglish.com/french, youglish.com/russian) and it can work for words that are in that language. However, try to search for Docker in videos in French, or Kubernetes in videos in Russian and you'll quickly see its limits.

It goes without saying that it's easier to read about a topic you have done quite a lot of reading about already.

For example, after I joined the company, we had projects with organizations in health, energy, banking, telecoms, retail, and other domains.

It just happened that when I was younger, I had "wasted" time doing a project in the telecom space and reading a lot about it, doing some work in college about heart anomaly detection, multiphase flows, interning at energy service companies and reading many books about reservoir characterization. Working on a personal project for currency conversion and reading books about banking. My background and knowing a certain type of equipments opened the doors when dealing with a certain organization as well.

Pretty much all the things I had "wasted" many years reading before joining found an actual "utility" and I did not start from scratch.

I have yet to find a use for a book about dog training in Russian. I don't know what took me that night, but I figured I'd try and learn Russian reading that book.

This compounds. Not starting from scratch compounds. Some reading is a high-yield deposit. What also compounds is the goodwill of the domain experts: you read more, you read better, you ask better questions, you get better answers from more willing people.

- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_knowledge

- [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

- [2]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-captions-s...

- [3]: https://youglish.com/